


What Will Be Will Be

by Megchad22



Series: Honor cancels the apocalypse [2]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Apocalypse, End of the World, Gen, TIme Commission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:35:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25520704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megchad22/pseuds/Megchad22
Summary: The first apocalypse was not the world ender that you think it is.  Or how the Time Commission came into being.
Series: Honor cancels the apocalypse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1848868
Comments: 3
Kudos: 69





	What Will Be Will Be

Time is a strange thing, it layers over itself like scar tissue. Events build into large changes over and over until the finished product does not in any way resemble the start.

Such is the case with the Apocalypse. 

The first events of April 1st 2019 were not the end of  _ the  _ world, but they were the end of a world. Harold’s world. 

Harold Jenkins left home at 18, leaving behind a living father. Over the course of 12 years he got massive amounts of therapy and eventually found love. He found his passion in physics and worked as an adjunct professor at a local college. By all accounts, even private ones, he had moved past the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father to become a stable adult. On April 1st 2019, while Harold was teaching a class, an electric fire in the apartment below his and the old materials used in the building sparked a fire that moved too fast to be contained. Everyone died in the fire, including Harold's wife and two daughters. 

As a physicist, Harold knew that time travel was theoretically possible. He grew obsessed with making it a reality, with going back to save his family. It takes him 60 years to complete his time travel device. 

Then he goes back and fixes it, stops the electrical fire in its tracks.

Only for one of the people who would have died in that fire to set off a car bomb 10 minutes after. That bomb was just powerful enough to rupture the gas main. The resulting explosion took out the city block of Harold’s apartment building, including the time traveling Harold. 

The Harold of that timeline also chooses obsession. It takes him 63 years this time to complete his time travel device. This is due in part to some legal trouble that popped up when an old man whose DNA matched his being found among the rubble. Eventually it was deemed a fluke. 

The second attempt by Harold, the third April 1st overall, to stop the death of his family saw Harold killing the bomber before he could plant the car bomb. An hour later one of Harold’s neighbors, a hacker working with the government to stop other hackers, accidentally transmits the codes and commands to have a nuclear weapon dropped on the City, wiping out 95% of it. This time both Harolds died but through some luck hsi time travel device, and about 45% of his notes on it, survived. 

Both items are found three weeks later by a volunteer by the name of Amelia Beeman. Her brother had been a detective in the City and she was hoping to find either him or his remains. 

Amelia is not a physicist, and never actually learns why the City was nuked, so it takes her 5 years to figure out the time travel device. Then it takes another 3 for her to get to the right time period. She arrived on April 1st 2019, 6 hours before the fateful mistake. She spends most of the first 4 trying to convince her brother to leave. The last 2 she careened around wildly trying to stop the order. She is partially successful in that she made such a commotion that did not mistakenly call a nuclear strike on the City, instead mistakenly calling a nuclear strike on 10 major cities in Europe. 

The response from those countries, plus several others that had been waiting for the excuse, was within hours and wiped the Eastern Seaboard off the map.

Perhaps that would have been the end of things, with the time traveler dead but Amelia had spent three years time traveling and talking about her time travel device and the notes. 

No less than 30 different people had copies of the notes. Of those 30, 8 were able to recreate the time travel device. Four of them decided separately to try and stop April 1st, not yet the end of the world but inching closer. 1 chose to go careening through time, only to be killed immediately because he had built the time machine improperly. 2 went back to save loved ones not related to April 1st. The final one, Jakob Katz, went back to give wisdom to his younger self. It was only through this intervention that he married his high school sweetheart and had his son Dave.

The four who went back to save the Eastern United States each had a different belief over what had caused it. Two met while trying to fix things, their argument sparked off an event that ended with the entire North American Continent being destroyed.

The third, managed to go back and in trying to stop their argument sparked the first apocalypse. Nuclear winter set in and 80% of the world population died. 

It was the final person, a housewife from the 1940’s by the name of Kate, who first used the time travel device to travel outside of time to a pocket dimension. The buildings had already been there, the structure, but empty. 

This woman made four attempts to stop the end of the world from the pocket dimension. Each time making the situation far worse. She begins to recruit others from different time periods. It was then that they realized a limit to time travel.

Because time layers like scar tissue and the day April 1st 2019 is very, very scarred. The device, now much more compact and accurate, is no longer able to travel to the time period between 24 hours-5 minutes before the apocalypse. Even people who have used such devices within 24 hours of that point have had strange things happen when they crossed the 24 hour before point. As far as anyone can tell, that is how Carmichael ended up as a fish. 

The last attempt to prevent the Apocalypse came when the woman sent several agents far into the future. It was long past when the last zombie(no, no one is quite sure how they managed to get a zombie apocalypse although it was significantly weirdr than the viral apocalypse from the time before) had fallen and humanity was beginning to rebuild.

Kate had not been sure what she had been looking for until she found it. Humanity had evolved. They could do things that were beyond anything that could have been comprehended in her original time. Then she found the lab. Technology of the future allowed for the implantation of a near to term baby, ready to be born. 

This had to be it, what they needed to prevent the end of times. Using the briefcase she was able to steal the 43 zygotes and the tech needed to bring them to term.

Over the course of their attempts a hierarchy had emerged. Kate was not among the upper management by choice. The job of upper management was to remain in the pocket universe so that they could always tell when the apocalypse changed and what it changed to. Kate was far too hands on for that. 

It had been Carmichael, who had moved to Upper Management after his unfortunate transformation into a fish, that suggested Oct 1 1989 as the birth date for their heroes. No one thought that sending children into saving the world would be a good idea. Just like no one thought it would be a good idea for the children to be raised by the Commission. There was not a single member of the Commission that thought they could be good parents, even the ones that had formerly been parents. 

Each of the 43 mothers was chosen carefully. It was imperative that these children grew up with people that would love them and that could help them grow their powers. One or more of these children could save the world and they needed to love the world first. 

Then one of the children ended it and the number of survivors dropped to 100.

The scars lasted long past the wounds that caused them. Every change the Time Commission made was permanent. Unchangeable. So even though the addition of the children destroyed the future where they should have existed, the 43 continued to be born without the intervention of the time Commission.

After one of the 43 would be saviors became the cause of the apocalypse, the Time Commission changed. They would save what they could by maintaining the timeline. Kate finally put away the image of the family she left behind, her husband Jakob and their son David. She pushed away the name she was born with and took the name ‘The Handler’. She could never go home again. 

Time does not work in the same way in the pocket universe as it does in the timestream. Even one's personal time. Thus she held the line for 500 years. 250 years after she took up the post they recruited a new time agent by the name of Reginald Hargreeves. He worked as a case manager for 50 years before retiring. 

And then that fucker Hargreeves did something because almost as soon as he left the counter for surviving humans dropped from 100 to 0. 

Fucking Hargreeves. Maintenance goes on, The Time Commission is not sure how much worse things can get at this point but no one in the know is willing to chance the planet blowing up because of fucking Reginald Hargreeves. Then something unexpected happens.

The Survivor Counter changes. It goes from 0 to 1. Upper management almost drops dead. Carmichael is so surprised that his bowl goes cloudy for a few minutes, before the filtration system kicks in. No one knows what that means.

The Handler decided to meet the survivor personally. Whatever Vanya Hargreeves did to kill everyone prevented travel for decades after the apocalypse. Thus the Handler appeared 50 years into the end of the world to find an old man and a mannequin. It wouldn't be until much later that anyone would realize that Five was a fucking Hargreeves and that until his stint in the apocalypse he was being raised by that bastard Reginald.

Reginald was considered a dirty word at the Commission among the case managers. He had been a decent enough employee but he had also managed to do something that killed their last hundred survivors. 

All Five had to do was stick it out for 10 years, 10 years. He had already accomplished 8. That was 80% done. Fucking Hargreeves. 

And then the bastard actually managed to do it. He actually managed to cancel the apocalypse. 

Fucking Hargreeves. 

The Handler re-entered her office. Many of her case managers were being reassigned back to their natural time periods. The agents would be spread about where possible. Some would stay, those that could not go home again. They would continue to monitor the timeline, make sure that this is the timeline to be maintained. 

She looked at the drawer that held the picture of her husband and son. She may not be able to go home again, but she could let herself be for now.

Kate smiled and whispered, “What will be will be.”

**Author's Note:**

> You know what I hate my brain sometimes. I was right there in the middle of some Time Commission speculation and the WHAM! I get hit with Dave was the son of the Handler and a time traveler and that was why he was targeted by the Commission.


End file.
